After Trump’s illegal Venezuela coup, there are two dangers: he is emboldened, but has no clue what comes next | Rajan Menon

The US president used largely fictitious charges to seize control, but can’t know how Venezuelans will react. He may also overstep now as regards Iran

During his presidential campaigns, Donald Trump pledged to end “forever wars”, abandon “nation-building” interventions and focus instead on reviving a US economy that, in his telling, had been deindustrialised by a floodtide of imports. Though Trump’s electoral victories cannot be attributed to any one thing, his “America first” narrative certainly struck a chord.

But Trump’s use of force to seize the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, his full-bore support for Israel’s demolition of Gaza and his bombing of Iran’s nuclear enrichment installations show that he’s no less willing than his predecessors to resort to military interventions.

Rajan Menon is a professor emeritus of international relations at the City College of New York and a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies